The Mission

CHAPTER 10

The traveler walked the dusty path, a solitary figure in a very inhospitable land. The person was tall, wrapped in gray robes that were worn and dirty. A hood covered her face, the only indication of her sex being the slight curve at bosom and hips. She had a large pack on her back that she carried easily.

The path could barely be called that. She had picked it up thirty miles southwest of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. She had not seen a human in the four days since starting her journey. At times the path was so overgrown, she used the machete strapped to her waist to cut through. But always she pressed on, even moving at night, resting only a few hours out of each twenty-four-hour cycle. She wished there were another way, but by foot was the only means of finding where she wanted to go. The trail was ancient, and modern means would not work to follow it.

The path ran along the Great Rift Valley. The longest, continuous crack on land on the surface of the planet, the valley ran from southern Turkey, through Syria, between Israel and Jordan where the Dead Sea lay — the lowest point on the face of the planet. From there it formed the basin of the Red Sea. At the Gulf of Aden the Rift Valley broke into two, one part going into the Indian Ocean, the other inland into Africa, the track the woman was currently on.

To her west, she knew the Rift Valley framed Lake Victoria, the world’s second-largest freshwater lake. Ahead of her, it went south for hundreds of miles through the rest of Kenya, into Tanzania, before ending somewhere in Mozambique. The Rift Valley made California’s San Andreas fault look like a child’s scratching on the face of the planet, while this split was the work of a god.

The land she passed through was tumbled and broken. A river ran through the lowest part, surrounded on both sides by high, tortuous mountains. The path roughly paralleled the river. The sun beat down on the land, raising the daytime temperature easily over one hundred. She relished the heat even though it was difficult to adjust to, as she had spent the past twenty-two years under the ice in Antarctica. To those she had worked with there, she had been known only by the name Lexina, the head of STAAR. Since they had fled Scorpion Base, her small group had scattered across the globe to continue their tasks, but as always, it seemed as if all they were doing was reacting.

Lexina paused as she turned a bend. She scanned the terrain until she saw the anomaly in the growth near the trail. Drawing her machete, she cut through the weeds and cleared away the vegetation. A weathered stone obelisk, five meters high, slowly became visible. It was on the side of the path, half obscured with weeds, the stone itself worn with the passing of many years.

Long, pale fingers reached out and traced the markings on the stone. It was the third such obelisk she had passed in the last few days.

They were markers, border stones from the ancient Empire of Axum. The top half of the stone was covered with Ge-ez, the official language of Axum. Lexina could read it — indeed, it was not a dead language, as it was still in use among a few monks of the Ethiopian church.

Axum was accepted by historians as one of the earliest empires in the world, founded around the first or second century before the birth of Christ. The empire covered most of what was now Ethiopia and Kenya. It traded with Greece and Rome during its heyday, while at the same time reaching to the east to India and even China.

Lexina also knew it was an empire few people had heard of. Mostly because it was here in Africa and because it was an empire of dark-skinned people — not the most popular subject around the world’s history courses. But at its height, Axum rivaled any of the kingdoms it traded with — Rome, China, India. And it had a most interesting history. Like many early peoples, the people of Axum worshiped a sun god. Even long after Christianity came to Axum, the Queen of Sheba was reported to be a sun god worshiper. Although she was known to most in the present day as the Queen of Sheba and her visit with King Solomon was well recorded, Lexina and those who knew the history of Axum knew her official title was Queen of Sheba and Axum.

This marker made mention of the queen, and her borders, but it was the bottom half of the marker that interested her. She could make some sense of the writing there also — the high rune language.

The markings indicated she was on the right path.

She pulled a small headset out of a fold in her cloak. The mike was voice-activated, the cord connecting it to a very small but powerful transmitter in her pack.

“Elek?”

She waited a moment.

“Elek?”

“Yes?” The voice on the other end was crystal clear, relayed through the earpiece.

“I have found another stone,” Lexina said.

“The path is still good?”

“Yes. Anything further on your mission?”

“I am arranging transportation and mercenaries. That is proving to be difficult, but not impossible.”

“We are running out of time,” Lexina said.

“I will be ready to move on schedule.”

“That may not be good enough. You must find the power.”

“The power will be no good without—”

“I know,” Lexina snapped. “Do you have any further information that could help my quest?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Coridan and Gergor?”

“They have done what they were ordered to.”

“Did they find it?”

“No.”

“I will check with you later.”

She took the headset off.

Lexina continued. As the path went up over a rise, she stopped. Far in the distance was a shimmering white cloud. She stared at it for several minutes, but it didn’t move. She pulled the hood back. Her face was pale and smooth, the white hair cut tight against her skull. She wore black wraparound sunglasses.

She pulled the sunglasses off for a moment. Red, elongated pupils narrowed as the bright sun hit them, but she wanted a clear look. She knew the white wasn’t a cloud but snow, the very top of Mount Kilimanjaro, rising 19,340 feet above the plain that surrounded it. Her destination, according to the markers, was to the west of that landmark. She put the glasses back on.

“My men have gone completely around the tomb and checked all the approaches. The army is too strong. They have tanks, we have rifles. They have helicopters, we have grenades.” For Lo Fa that was a speech. He had spoken in a low voice, so that only Che Lu could hear him.

The small grove that sheltered the group’s base camp had filled up. The men’s women had arrived, bringing their children. Che Lu had not realized how extensive the rebellion was. Wandering the camp, she heard tales of villages being burned, people slaughtered.

The population in this part of China differed somewhat ethnically from the east, but more important, Islam was the religion of the majority of people. The central government had long waged battle against that religion as its practitioners looked westward rather than east.

Che Lu had seen many refugees in her life and the sight never failed to depress her. They were people who had lost everything but their spirit and what they carried on their back. Having lived through all of China’s modern history, she found it particularly ironic that the government in Beijing, which had been founded by those she had been with on the Long March — refugees to the extreme — were now inflicting the same situation on their own people.

Che Lu returned her attention to Lo Fa, who had accepted a tin of stew from a young girl. Che Lu had been reading Nabinger’s notebook while the guerrillas did their reconnaissance.

“Has the army entered?” she asked.

“No. Remember, they sealed the entrance you went in. The only opening right now is the way you got out, on the top. They have rigged explosives around it and have guns trained on it, as if they fear someone coming out more than they consider going in themselves. They fear the tomb.”

Che Lu knew a westerner would find such a reaction by an army to be strange, but the Chinese people had different beliefs and values from those in the West. What checked the army from going in were several factors. One was an ingrained respect for ancestors — thus any entry into a tomb was viewed as a terrible crime. Another, though, was fear of the unknown. The army had to know by now that there was more to the tomb than just the graves of Gao-zong and his empress.

“So they wait and do nothing,” she said.

“They keep us from getting in,” Lo Fa replied. “That is something.” She held up Nabinger’s notebook. “I have discovered some interesting information.”

“What is that?”

“Shi Huangdi.”

“The First Emperor. The Son of Heaven.” Even Lo Fa knew who that was, as did every Chinese.

“Yes. The emperor who unified China. Who pulled together the Great Wall.” “What about him?” Lo Fa asked.

“I think he is in the tomb.”

Lo Fa considered the old woman. “How can that be? The tomb holds Gao-zong and his empress. Gao-zong was of the Tuang Dynasty, well after Shi Huangdi.”

Che Lu shrugged. “That is what some of the notes that Professor Nabinger transcribed indicate. I do not know how it can be, but also remember that Nabinger told me that part of the Great Wall had been built in the form of an Airlia high rune. Since Shi Huangdi was responsible for most of the Great Wall, it must be that he was somehow connected with these aliens.”

“Ahh…” Lo Fa shook his head. “This is crazy talk. Aliens. The Wall built to signal to space. Flying saucers.” He looked away.

Che Lu felt sorry for her old friend. His world, the world he had grown up in and lived in for over seven decades, was being thrown on its ear. The rulers in Beijing were all old men like Lo Fa, and she knew they were having an even harder time accepting the new reality, especially since they had so much more to lose than her friend.

“Just think,” Che Lu pressed. “If we discover the link between Shi Huangdi and the aliens, it may mean we were indeed the central kingdom. The source of civilization. Not the way we had always thought, but still in a way. Perhaps we were the chosen of the Airlia, the humans picked to be their special people.

“Nabinger told me some things,” Che Lu continued. “When they found the ruby sphere in the great cavern in Africa, they found a stone marker. It talked of Cing Ho.”

“Who is that?”

“I thought he was nothing more than a legend. A made-up tale. According to the story, Cing Ho was a sailor, the admiral of a fleet that sailed from China, through the Straits of Malacca, past India, to Africa and the Middle East. He did this long before the Silk Road was open to Rome, before the birth of Christ.”

Lo Fa pulled some tobacco and paper out of a pouch and began making a cigarette. “So?”

“So? First, if Cing Ho was real, it means there was a Chinese sailor traveling farther than any explorer of his time. According to history, we did not use the compass for navigation until A.D. 1120, although there are records of magnetic pointers being used thousands of years earlier in the emperor’s courts for divining purposes. But maybe Cing Ho did use a divining compass to navigate to the Middle East. And, if he was the one who placed the ruby sphere in that cavern, as the stone indicates, then he had some connection with the Airlia.”

“So?”

Che Lu could not tell if her old friend was trying to antagonize her or not. “Then we — China, the Middle Kingdom — are central to all of this.”

“We do not know what this is,” Lo Fa noted.

“If we get in the tomb we can find out,” Che Lu said. “What is interesting to me is the thing that destroyed China as a world power was our unwillingness to go outside of our borders in the last five centuries. The last time we made any attempt to was in 1405.”

“Are you giving me a history lesson?” Lo Fa asked.

Che Lu ignored the sarcasm. “In 1405, over twenty thousand men and three hundred seventeen ships led by Zheng He left China and traveled west, following the route Cing Ho took over two millennia previously.” She thumped Lo Fa on his skinny chest. “They went to the Middle East. To northeast Africa. And then they came home and China never again mounted any sort of expedition. And the question I have, old man, is what were they looking for? And did they find it? Is that why they came home? Or did they fail? If they did find whatever it was that Cing Ho removed so many years ago, is it now inside the tomb in front of us? Or did they take something with them like Cing Ho did? I believe the answer lies inside the tomb.”

“This thinking is all fine and well,” Lo Fa said, “but it will not get us in the tomb.”

Che Lu ignored the comment. “Shi Huangdi,” she whispered.

“What of Shi Huangdi, old woman?”

“There are many legends surrounding Shi Huangdi,” Che Lu said. “He has been called the Yellow Emperor, among many other titles. It is said when he was born there was a great radiance in the sky, coming from the region of Ursa Major. In his biography it is written that when he met the Empress of the West in the mountains of Wangwu, they made something together.”

“A child?” Lo Fa said with a smile.

“No. Twelve large mirrors.”

Lo Fa was interested despite himself. “Who was the Empress of the West?” “I don’t know.”

“Well, what about these mirrors?”

“I also don’t know much about that,” Che Lu admitted. “In conjunction with the mirrors, there were things called tripods. These tripods pointed the mirrors to the heavens. Zao Ji wrote about the tripods of Shi Huangdi in a text I have read. There are many rumors about these tripods and mirrors in ancient texts, enough that I have to believe there is a truth underneath.

“They were supposed to be able to manipulate gravity. To emit loud noises. To look at the stars. And Shi Huangdi was supposed to be able to control the thunder. Perhaps through these devices.”

“Interesting legend,” Lo Fa said.

“You have heard of Chi Yu, have you not?” Che Lu asked.

“Who?” Lo Fa’s voice quivered slightly, and Che Lu knew he had heard of that legend. Perhaps told by his mother, to scare him into going to bed as a young boy.

“While Shi Huangdi ruled in the north, Chi Yu was the name of the ruler in the south. But Chi Yu was different. Not a man, according to legend, but a metal beast. With many arms and legs and eyes. Who could fly about the countryside.” Che Lu pointed to the mountain tomb. “The answer to many mysteries lie inside, Lo Fa.”

Lo Fa spit. “That may be, old woman. But all your legends still won’t get us inside.”

“Can you get me a radio?” Che Lu asked. “One that speaks to the satellites?” Lo Fa nodded. “I think I know where one is. It will take some time.”

“You get me a radio,” Che Lu said. “Then I can call for help.”

“Who will help us?” Lo Fa asked.

“I will ask UNAOC.”

Lo Fa laughed. “They will not try again.”

“I can only ask. If they do not give us help, then it is up to me alone.” “I will get the radio.”

“What’s the plan?”

Lisa Duncan was startled. She had not heard Mike Turcotte walk into the conference room with Yakov. She pointed for them to take seats at the table.

“I sent Major Quinn and Larry Kincaid back on the bouncer to Area 51. I contacted a friend of mine at USAMRIID — the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. She’s promised me some help. A bouncer will pick her people up and bring them to us along with some special gear. Once they get here, you go south with them and find out what exactly is going on.”

“And then?” Turcotte asked.

“We try to stop this.”

“An optimist,” Yakov said with a dry chuckle.

A madman working in a wax museum could not have produced a more gruesome scene. The bodies were twisted into grotesque shapes. Mouths were open; silent lips that would never know the passage of a final scream were pulled wide over fangs. Chests had been sliced opened, red blood frozen and caught hanging like threads of red. The eyes were the worst. Black orbs staring aimlessly out, framed in red blood like cheap eyeliner that an epileptic makeup artist had applied.

Steve Norward didn’t like dealing with frozen bodies. Not out of any sense of aesthetics, but because frozen objects had pointy parts and pointy parts make holes in gloves and flesh. And this frozen locker was hot. As hot as any place on earth. And hot plus a hole in the protective suit he wore equaled dead.

Inside his suit, Norward was a large man. He just barely made it inside the Army’s weight standards every time his annual PT test rolled around, and that was only after careful dieting and some fudging by the unit first sergeant on both the scale and height recorded. The philosophy around USAMRIID was that they weren’t going to have one of their own separated from the army just because of some stupid rules that had nothing to do with the capability to do their job.

Norward had light hair and a wide, cheerful face that belied a man who was handling dead bodies. Very carefully, he rolled a cart under one of the monkeys. He pushed a button, and the chain that had held the body lowered the carcass until its entire weight was on the cart. Carefully he unfastened the meat hook that was jammed through the monkey’s back from the chain, leaving the implement in place.

Norward slowed his breathing. His faceplate was fogging up and the air inside his suit was getting stale. He rolled the cart out of the refrigerator room and shut the large steel door behind him. Then he went down the corridor to the necropsy room, where he plugged in the air hose for his suit to a wall socket. The familiar sound of fresh air being pumped filled his ears and the mask cleared. The sound was as comforting to him as the whine of a smoothly running engine was to a pilot.

He locked the wheels on the base of the cart so it wouldn’t move. Every action was slow and deliberate.

Norward pulled extra-large surgical gloves over the space suit gloves, then glanced at the second living occupant of the room and pointed at the monkey. “On three.”

The other person had the name Laniea stenciled on the chest and a woman’s voice echoed over the radio to confirm she understood. “On three.”

“One.” Norward and Laniea each grabbed one end of the monkey. “Two. Three.” They lifted the body and placed it on an operating table, handling it as delicately as they would a bomb, which in effect it was. The monkey was dead, but there were things inside it that existed in a netherworld between life and death, waiting on other living flesh to devour just as it had devoured that of the monkey’s.

“It’ll take a couple of hours to defrost,” Norward said. “We’ll do the cutting on this one at thirteen hundred.”

“All right,” Laniea acknowledged. She was tiny inside her oversized suit.

Norward turned to the other table, where a second monkey lay. They had taken it out of the freezer the previous evening. Norward picked up a scalpel and handed it to Laniea. “Welcome to Level Four. Your first patient, Doctor.”

He couldn’t see Laniea’s face as she bent over the corpse. “Thank you, Doctor.” She pressed the blade into the monkey’s stomach and sliced. The interior cavity was full of pooled blood.

Norward watched his subordinate as she worked, making sure that she was noting all key abnormalities, although most were not hard to spot. The kidneys were totally gone. The liver was yellow, and part of it had dissolved.

He took the samples she was cutting off and placed them onto glass slides, the only glass allowed on Level 4. When she indicated, he took a pair of large clamps and cracked the monkey’s chest, holding open the rib cage for her to work.

There was a crackling noise in the air, and Laniea was startled. She froze and looked at Norward, trying to guess what the cause was. “Voice box,” he mouthed to her, looking up at the ceiling. She looked relieved. Any break in the routine was scary down here.

The speaker crackled again, and this time he recognized a woman’s voice, the commander of the USAMRIID, Colonel Carmen.

“Dan, we have a development in South America.”

A development, Norward thought, his pulse skipping a beat.

“I need you to look at something,” Carmen’s voice continued. “ASAP.”

Norward unplugged his air hose and moved to the air lock. He stepped in. His mask was fogging badly. “Got to have control,” he whispered to himself, slowing his breathing. The lock cycled and he stepped through. He ripped off his boots, then stepped into the next chamber. He pulled a chain and the suit was hosed down. He waited impatiently as the shower ran through its sequence. There was no way to make it go quicker. Not if it was going to ensure that anything that might be on his suit was gone.

A development. The word echoed through Norward’s consciousness. He was coming out of one of only two biohazard Level 4 labs in the country. The other one was at the Centers for Disease Control — CDC — headquarters in Atlanta. The people who worked at both USAMRIID and CDC around Level 4 agents knew that a development usually meant someone had died and that more people were going to die unless they intervened quickly and effectively.

It was obvious to most people why the CDC had such an interest in disease. It was less obvious why the Army ran one, except to students of military history. Even in the relatively modern times of the last century, more soldiers died of disease than in battle. Whenever masses of men gathered together, pestilence was never far away.

The shower finally shut down. Norward walked into the staging area and took off his suit. He rapidly threw on his Class B uniform and went to the elevator, still tucking the light-green shirt in.

The door opened and he rode it up to ground level. When the door opened, Colonel Carmen was waiting, dressed in sweatpants and a faded green surgical shirt — her normal work uniform. “This way,” Carmen said. They went directly to her office. Four other people were gathered there: the other top experts in the office on bio-agents.

“We’ve already looked at this.” She handed him the satellite imagery forwarded from Area 51. “First image was taken yesterday. The second one is today’s.”

“Oh, God,” Norward muttered as he saw the blue dots in the one village, then the red in the next. He knew what those temperatures meant. The second image showed the spread.

“That was our conclusion,” Colonel Carmen remarked dryly.

Norward looked around the room and then focused on one man. “What do you think, Joe?”

“It’s South America, so it’s not likely to be Ebola,” the man said. He was dressed casually in cut-off jean shorts and T-shirt. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, but Norward knew that Joe Kenyon was only twenty-eight. He’d had a tough life. He had black hair hanging down to his collar, and framing his face was the outline of a two-day beard — Norward wondered how Kenyon always managed to look forty-eight hours from his last shave.

Kenyon was a civilian on contract with USAMRIID. Inside the tight community of scientists that dealt with deadly infectious diseases, Kenyon was known as a virus cowboy. Someone who traveled around the world looking for microscopic bugs that killed. Corralled them. Brought them back to Level 4. Then tried to take them apart to find a way to beat them.

Kenyon was the resident genius on Level 4 bio-agents at USAMRIID. He had a Ph.D. in epidemiology and six years’ experience in the field. “There’s no way we can tell without going there and taking a look-see.”

“What’s in this area?” Norward asked.

“Small villages scattered about the jungle,” Colonel Carmen said. “They make their living harvesting coca leaves and making paste for shipment to drug dealers.”

Norward checked the two photos against each other. “This thing is moving fast. How is it getting transmitted?”

“We won’t know that until we get there,” Kenyon said.

“Who’s calling us in on this?” Norward asked.

Colonel Carmen sat behind her desk and steepled her fingers. “That’s the hard part. We haven’t officially been called in. This is coming from, let us say, unofficial channels. There’s a bouncer en route to our location to pick you guys up, link you up with some other people, and take you to ground zero.”

“A bouncer?” Norward frowned. “I don’t—”

“The less questions you ask right now, the less I have to tell you I don’t know,” Carmen said. She pointed at the imagery in his hands. “Let’s deal with that first. God knows what it is, but it’s spreading fast. Be ready to move in thirty minutes.”

“That’s the spot,” Faulkener said.

Toland looked at the border crossing. The rest of the mercenaries were farther back, hidden in some low ground. There was only the faint impression of a rough road cutting across the ground. No border post. No sign that there was even an international border between Bolivia and Brazil.

“We’ll keep surveillance on it,” Toland said. “I wouldn’t put it past The Mission to have a trap set for us now.”

Faulkener turned to him. “Who exactly is The Mission?” The two had always worked for The Mission using a cutout, never meeting their occasional employers face-to-face.

“I’ve heard they’re Germans.” Toland spit. “Nazis. Hiding in the damn jungle all these years.”

“I don’t like working for no Nazis,” Faulkener said.

“You want the money or not?” Toland said. “After this job we can retire. Quit and live in style.”

Faulkener’s silence was answer enough. Faulkener glanced toward where the other men were. “Some of the men are sick. Justin is in real bad shape. He’s throwing up blood.”

Toland had been thinking. “All right. I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s better for us to go small. Let those go who want to and get rid of all that are sick. We’ll keep about four good men who you trust. Whatever this guy we’re to link up with is coming after, it’s worth five million to The Mission. And after we get him where he wants to go,” Toland added, “we’ll have both the guy and whatever it is.”